I'm trying to re-partition my new PowerMac G5 so as to dual boot Linux / OS X off it, but have a few questions regarding the boot mechanism of a PowerMac (I know the linux side of things is not relevant to this forum).
1. On a PC, there is the MBR / boot sector, and for dual booting between Windows & Linux it's a trivial matter of having linux install a boot loader onto the MBR - from the ppc/linux forums, it would appear as if the PowerMac ONLY knows how to boot off from the first (e.g. default) HDD - and thus I must create a 'bootstrap' partition for it on my primary drive, even if I plan to install the rest of the [linux] system onto a secondary HDD. Is this correct?
2. With the above being the case, I need to resize my current Apple partitions (which I have a tool to do) but am confused by the default partition setup. I don't want to remove my OS X so preferably don't want to remove everything then install from scratch (which would be easy) as a solution.
Out of the box, my G5's partitions are:
i. 0.00 - 0.031mb partition named 'Apple'
ii. 128.031 - 152627.831mb hfs+ partition
My question is - why are there two? And why does the second one start 128mb into the disk? Is the front 128mb wasted?
Assuming I was make changes to this to incorporate a bootstrap partition for my dual boot purposes, can I simply remove partition 1 and use that? Or does OS X NEED it to boot? In which case, if I resize something, what can I resize?
Nobody on the linux forums seem to be able to help with this.
Thanks!
Terence
1. On a PC, there is the MBR / boot sector, and for dual booting between Windows & Linux it's a trivial matter of having linux install a boot loader onto the MBR - from the ppc/linux forums, it would appear as if the PowerMac ONLY knows how to boot off from the first (e.g. default) HDD - and thus I must create a 'bootstrap' partition for it on my primary drive, even if I plan to install the rest of the [linux] system onto a secondary HDD. Is this correct?
2. With the above being the case, I need to resize my current Apple partitions (which I have a tool to do) but am confused by the default partition setup. I don't want to remove my OS X so preferably don't want to remove everything then install from scratch (which would be easy) as a solution.
Out of the box, my G5's partitions are:
i. 0.00 - 0.031mb partition named 'Apple'
ii. 128.031 - 152627.831mb hfs+ partition
My question is - why are there two? And why does the second one start 128mb into the disk? Is the front 128mb wasted?
Assuming I was make changes to this to incorporate a bootstrap partition for my dual boot purposes, can I simply remove partition 1 and use that? Or does OS X NEED it to boot? In which case, if I resize something, what can I resize?
Nobody on the linux forums seem to be able to help with this.
Thanks!
Terence